With only 15 selling days left in the quarter, keyboards are on fire, phones are abuzz, and reps are flying through their cadences, leaving no proverbial stone unturned. But with all of the hustle of an olympic hopeful, it’s easy to lunge into new prospecting plights with the same old sales habits.
In a conversation with my dad a few weeks back, I was reminded of a phrase that motivated me to think beyond this crutch:
Don’t be attached to a mistake just because it took you a long time to make it.”
Bad sales habits are the seemingly incorrigible mistakes that plague our productivity, stifle our creativity, and continue to hold us back from becoming successful modern sales organizations. And by definition, a modern sales organization is one that challenges the status quo through new technologies and fresh perspectives, allowing them to rise above the outdated organizations of sales past.
That’s why it’s crucial to first recognize, and then remove these bad sales problems one by one, and create a new set of sales habits that will help us be more, do more, and become more as modern sales professionals.
In our recent eBook, Houston, We Have a Sales Problem, we addressed a few of these issues head on:
- Sales reps are spending less time selling
- Customers are harder to reach
- Personalization is difficult
- Success is difficult to replicate
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But to take a cue from my dad’s advice, and to find a new way to motivate you during final selling days of the quarter, I decided to turn those problems into positive sales habits — encouraging new ways to look at your sales process and create better strategies for connecting with buyers.
Habit #1: Let automation help you.
The amount of manual work that goes into updating your CRM is no secret. But it shouldn’t be a total time suck… and it shouldn’t be neglected either. (Seriously, ask your resident sales nerd… thou shalt not abandon your data!)
That’s where automation comes in. Start using sales tools that sync automatically with your CRM, allowing you to complete a task in one platform, while the appropriate record is then automatically updated, with no additional effort on your part. This simple step saves time, resources, and allows you to focus on the activity that truly matters: selling.
Habit #2: Get creative when reaching out to new customers.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: using the same old methods to pursue modern leads is an exercise in futility.
A study from Sirius Decisions found that the average sales rep only makes 2 attempts to contact a prospect, but it can up to 8 tries to actually reach a prospect these days. That’s why it’s important to get creative and find new and innovative ways to reach these prospective customers.
Deliver a cadence that’s both steady and unique, allowing you to truly connect with people in a sincere and positive way. Trust me, both you and the people you’re calling will appreciate the break in the hum drum of most peoples’ sales processes.
Habit #3: Personalize your process.
I know it’s easy to overlook this fact in the technology-laden social media world we live in, but lest not forget: we are all human. Both you and the people you are hoping to help with your product are just human beings trying to make the world a better place.
So use that. Allow your process to be injected with personalization at all points. Take the time to get to know the people you are reaching out to, and find ways to incorporate your findings into your messaging.
Go to the same college as a prospective customer? Sign your email with a common rally cry to get their attention. (Hey all you ramblin’ wrecks out there… What’s the good word?!) Any way you can find common ground with your customers is another opportunity to connect on a more human level.
Habit #4: Collaborate with your teammates.
Either you’re the rockstar rep who hits quota every single month, or you sit next to them. Either way, there’s an opportunity here to grow as a team through sales collaboration.
Tools like Salesloft surface the top performing messages and strategies in a dashboard for the entire team, allowing you to take and repurpose the best techniques of you and your teammates, on the fly.
But whether it’s using the help of a sales engagement platform like Salesloft, or creating a communication channel between you and the other reps on your team, always encourage collaboration amongst your team to help bring yourselves up as a whole. Salesloft AE Stephen Gladney is the first to say that it works, admitting that, “you’d really be surprised about how much more participation you’ll get when you actively promote it and encourage it.”
Let’s all make a promise, right here and now, to stop allowing old sales problems of the past dominate our sales organizations’ future. All it takes is the simple step in the right direction of creating new sales habits to practice day in and day out, until they become second nature to each and every rep.
They say it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. So what do you say? Let’s kick off Q4 with a handful of new sales habits, and take the customer acquisition process to a whole new level.
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Download your copy of the eBook today to launch into greater detail on each of these issues, how deeply they impact a sales organization, and what using the right sales tools can do to solve them.
